


Watching Fires

by dear_tiger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-06
Updated: 2012-09-06
Packaged: 2017-11-13 17:06:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_tiger/pseuds/dear_tiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam knows that it’s a bad idea to go hunting monsters on a day when he’d rather run into a burning house than say another word to his brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watching Fires

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to tesserae_ for being a wonderful beta. She supplied a couple of lines, too.

_02:10_

The car smelled like smoke, reminding Sam of that time when they had to burn seven bodies in one night. He thought then that the smell was never going to come out. Maybe it wouldn’t this time. Maybe he reached his personal stench limit. 

It was a little hard to keep his thoughts straight.

Sam rolled his head to look at Dean just as they passed one of the rare streetlights, and Dean’s face lit up for a moment as if there was a halo around his head. Sam had some vague recollection of an art history class and of the Medieval paintings where the halos always looked the same, like shiny plates, whether the saint was depicted facing forward or in profile. He wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t make this one up. Another streetlight – and Dean’s questionable halo flashed again and disappeared into the dark the next moment. Dean looked like a saint, or a hero. 

_You pulled me out of a burning house,_ Sam wanted to say, _again._ He opened his mouth to do so and started coughing instead. The inside of his mouth tasted like bile and smoke. 

When the coughing fit subsided, he became aware they they’d pulled up on the side of the road and that Dean was pressing an oxygen mask to his face. It must have slipped off to his chest without him noticing. The gas cooled what felt like a nasty sunburn on his cheeks. Sam didn’t try to speak but nodded and took the mask, holding it over his nose and mouth. He felt Dean’s fingers brush the back of his head as he put the elastic band in place. 

“Sammy. You want to go to a hospital?”

Sam shook his head. The motion set the world spinning and tilting sideways, until he felt like he was going to tumble out through the Impala’s open window and keep falling towards the western horizon, just keep orbiting the Earth like that forever. 

“Okay,” Dean said. He took the car out on the road again.

Sam kept his mask on and kept his thoughts more or less uncomplicated. Dean, for instance, he was awesome. He was also the most irritating, infuriating person Sam knew but that was too complicated of a thought. Keep it simple, he told himself. 

“You pulled me out of a fire,” he said.

Dean looked at him, a little startled. The expression on his face was incredulous. Sam had an idea that he wanted to keep staring, if only he didn’t have to watch the road. “You know what?” Dean said. “You know what, you’re gonna have to explain what you were doing in there by yourself.” He shook his head, pressed a hand over his mouth like he wanted to stop talking, then clearly changed his mind. “What the fuck, Sam? I looked around and you were gone. Straight into a burning house, and didn’t tell me a thing.”

Sam shrugged. His throat hurt, so he wanted to limit conversation to the absolute necessary words. _It’s my stupid day,_ he thought. He said, “I saw a horse.”

Dean gave him a look like he was reconsidering the hospital. “You went inside a burning farmhouse that looked – and for a good reason, Sam, goddammit – looked like it was going to collapse. You didn’t tell me a thing. And all of that was to rescue a fucking horse?” 

Sam closed his eyes and breathed deep. He didn’t have the lung capacity to start a yelling match all over again. “Our kind of horse.”

“What does that mean?”

“Had no head.” Sam grabbed a water bottle before continuing. The water was warm and tasted like burning. “It was purple. And it breathed fire.” 

“Okay. Okay, I still don’t get why you didn’t tell me.”

They shouldn’t have taken this hunt, Sam thought. Farmhouses, construction sites and barns were going up in flames along a twenty-mile stretch of a lonely county road in California, and no traces of accelerant were ever found. Dean thought it was cool and Sam thought it was far enough from Milwaukee and Agent Henriksen. They should have passed it on to somebody else through Bobby or Ellen when it became clear that they were getting into a bad stretch with each other. Too many hours in the car together, too many close calls with the police, too many bad dreams, too much bad food, and who knew what else. You don’t go hunting monsters on a day when you’d rather run into a burning house than speak another word to your brother. Because when half of the building comes down, when there’s fire and grey smoke everywhere and no headless purple horse and you can’t find your way out… _No, I take that back. It’s my stupid week._

 

_21:20_

“Sam? Why’re you calling me?”

“You in the store yet?” 

“Sure. You okay?”

“I’m fine. I found something about the headless purple horse. It’s a mule, actually.”

“Sam…”

“Well, it’s a woman. She’s usually someone who committed some hideous crime, a child-killer or a cannibal, or someone who seduced a priest in a church. Yeah, I’m not sure about that last one…”

“Sam.” 

“And for her sins, she’s cursed to turn into a purple headless mule at night and gallop along lonely roads, breathing fire out of her severed neck. I’d bet you that’s how the fires started.”

“Sam, for fuck’s sake…”

“Listen! She wears an iron bridle on her non-existent head, and we need to remove it so that she wouldn’t turn again.” 

“You done?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I don’t care, Sam, if it’s a purple mule or a magenta camel. I’m not hunting this one with you. I’ll pass it on to Bobby when I come back, and once you’re done puking, we’re leaving. Sam? Hey, Sam?”

“You’re gonna stop yelling at me right now.”

“…Okay.”

“Alright, Dean, maybe you have a point.”

“Of course I do. I’m older.”

“Whatever.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“My head hurts. Hey, would you get me some ice chips?”

“What’s wrong with the cooler in the back?”

“Dean! How would you like to lick the hands of every person that’s been through here in the past week?”

“They got scoops… Fine, Jesus! I’ll get you ice chips in a pretty little package. Want one of them umbrellas in it?”

“Fuck you, too. Don’t speed on the way back.”

“Keep your oxygen on.” 

 

_23:55_

The first thing Sam did when he opened his eyes was turn on the police scanner. The second thing was wake up all the way. 

He sat up in bed, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, which felt about as good as a handful on sand on the eyeballs. His head was heavy, throbbing, and he tried to focus on the scanner’s chirping to find his way back to reality. The reality wasn’t very pleasant. For one, there was a trickle of a cough building up somewhere in his chest, and coughing was going to hurt like a bitch. Sam found his oxygen mask on the bedspread with the gas still running – he had fallen asleep without meaning to, and it must have slipped off. He pressed it over his mouth and took a few careful breaths.

Dean’s bed was empty. Sam eyed it as he climbed out of his own bed and wandered into the bathroom to piss, taking his oxygen tank along and not bothering to close the door since for now he was alone. He couldn’t hear the scanner as well through the door. Sam put one hand on the wall for stability and closed his eyes and thought of ice chips. Ice chips sounded good. Dean was probably picking up burgers for dinner which he could eat by himself, as long as he got ice. 

Sam flushed the toilet and walked back into the room, switching on the lights along the way. The scanner, tuned to the fire department’s wavelength, carried snatches of conversations between dispatchers and the county’s volunteer brigades. He’d been listening to it on and off all day, driving Dean nuts with the stream of codes and repetitive remarks. By the sound of things, there was another fire a couple of miles from the one where Sam got stuck the night before, this one in a barn. Sam sat down in the chair to avoid falling asleep again, turned on his laptop and stared at the screen. His head hurt. His chest hurt.

The scanner spat out brief conversations between the firemen and the dispatcher. Sam decided he’d switch it off once Dean returned, and fuck potential information about the case. It’d have to be found some other way, and probably by someone else. 

Sam drank some water to ease the burning in his throat. It didn’t help much but the coldness of it sliding into his stomach felt good nevertheless. Distantly, Sam understood that his stomach was empty, but the thought of any food seemed repulsive. Except for ice chips, that is. Those he craved like heroin. Sam sighed and made himself read the same sentence on the local newspaper’s website for the third time, trying to focus on what it said. 

_“Dispatch, Engine 4, we need a medic unit. I got a female victim, confused, signs of smoke poisoning, pulse fast and irregular, airway might become unstable.”_

Sam paused with his hand over the keyboard and eyed the radio. He felt his heart speed up all of a sudden, and then he was afraid he’d start coughing and miss whatever else the radio was going to say.

_“Engine 4, Medic 1 is responding.”_

The radio crackled, and Sam could almost see him, the Engine 4 guy, some fireman with a bushy mustache with the radio in his gloved hand. He waited for the other shoe to drop.

_“We might also need PD over here. Some guy was with the victim, looks suspicious. Not seriously hurt but he has some strange burns.”_

Sam checked his watch and felt a cold feeling creep up his spine. Three hours. It’d been almost three hours since he last spoke to Dean. He dialed Dean’s phone, and it rang and rang and went to voicemail, so Sam dialed it again and listened to the series of beeps. It went to voicemail again. 

“Dean, goddammit,” Sam said, before hanging up. He regretted it the next moment, because what if the police confiscated his phone and found the message that didn’t match whatever bullshit name was on his driver’s license? He grabbed his jacket on the way to the door but left the gun behind.

Outside, the vague bitter smell of bonfire dragged in on the wind from the east. The smell alone was enough to make Sam’s head pound harder. He stood in the doorway for a moment, waiting for the parking lot to stop spinning. A nice little Honda, entirely unremarkable, was parked in the dark corner of the lot, under a pine tree that almost hid the car in its shade, and Sam headed towards it. If he got lucky, he might be able to return it before the owner noticed. It was no good thinking of an alternative version of the night, in which he’d have to break Dean out of the police station and go find a deeper hole for the two of them to hide in.

The Honda’s door lock turned out to be surprisingly stubborn, or else Sam’s hands were weaker than usual. “Come on, you piece of shit.” He just hoped that no potential observers were going to suspect a guy with an oxygen tank of breaking into a car. 

After a day of listening to the radio and trying to study fire patterns on the map, Sam had a fairly good idea of where the firefighting crew was working. The road led out of town and eventually into the hills, and hadn’t Dean noticed some burger place earlier that looked promising, up that way? It would make sense that he ended up at the scene of the fire somehow, smack in the middle of the action, with suspicious burns and a girl on his arm. That just had “Dean” written all over it. He probably had an ID on him with some name straight out of the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame, too, that somebody was going to recognize.

Sam expected to see the glare of the fire from miles away but it was mostly out by the time he got closer. The barn was away from the main road, up an overgrown road on some foreclosed or abandoned private property. Sam didn’t miss it in the dark only because an ambulance was pulling out onto the highway, lights flashing but the siren turned off in the absence of traffic. The barn was a smoldering ruin on the edge of a partially burned field, its north wall still being hosed down when Sam pulled up and parked the Honda a few feet away from a police car. And there was Dean, looking a little pale but at least able to sit up straight on the side of the road. There were fresh white bandages on his hands. Thankfully, the handcuffs were still dangling from the belt of the police officer standing over him, and not fastened onto Dean’s wrists.

Sam left the oxygen tank under the passenger seat before climbing out of the car. He hoped that, if he did still smell like smoke after two showers, the smell from the barn would cover it.

“You can’t go in here,” said the second policeman on the scene. 

The first officer and Dean both stared at Sam from a few feet away. Sam waved. Dean looked worried and irritated at the same time. He was sitting with his shoulders slumped, elbows resting on his knees. He looked like he had taken a roll through the burning barn. 

“That’s my brother,” Sam told the officer, whose nametag read G. Reavy. “He went out to get dinner and never came back, so I was worried.” 

Officer Reavy looked back at Dean, then at Sam again. “You two like hanging around fires?”

“Nothing like that. I was just out looking for him, saw an ambulance.” 

This far away, Sam couldn’t hear what Dean was saying to the policeman talking to him. Sam stared. Dean stole a glance at him and turned his attention to the officer again. 

“Alright, go sit over there,” said G. Reavy, pointing at the Honda. “Wait by your car, don’t leave. We might want to talk to you.” 

He turned his attention to his phone, and before he walked away, Sam caught him saying something about a woman and a hospital. Reavy walked over to his partner, briefly clasped Dean on the shoulder and pointed at Sam. The rest of his phone conversation was lost to the distance. After a while he hung up, and Dean stood up. The officers didn’t follow him, which was probably a good sign. Dean walked a little stiffly, choosing his footing with more care than usual, which was probably not such a good sign. _I guess we’ll live,_ Sam thought. 

After a minute of mutual silent staring, Dean sighed and nudged Sam over to sit on the hood of the Honda. 

“You heard something on your little radio, didn’t you?”

Sam looked down at his feet. He didn’t have it in him to have a fight about the scanner.

“Well, I guess you were right. It was good for something after all.”

“I guess. What happened?” 

Dean sighed. “I was driving back from the store and saw the fire. So I drove up here, and there was a purple horse with no head.”

“A mule.” 

“Whatever. It was breathing fire.”

Sam studied his brother’s hands. Dean noticed him looking and presented them palms up, with bandages white and fresh. “I burned myself on the bridle,” he explained. 

_Only you,_ Sam thought. Only Dean could go out for dinner, practically trip over the monster on the way back, save a girl from a curse and get questioned by the police for it. Sam felt something clench painfully in his chest and took it for another coughing fit, until he realized it wasn’t. “Hey, Dean,” he said. “What’s your problem with me?”

Dean groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Oh my god, Sam.”

“No, really.” Sam put a hand on his arm. “Really, I’m not picking a fight with you. I mean, we’ve been at each other’s throats for a week over all kinds of small shit, so what is it?”

Dean stared at his hands and started picking at the edge of a bandage. “I don’t have a problem with you.”

Sam watched his brother’s nervous fingers for a moment. “Okay, I’ll go first. I wish you wouldn’t drive twenty miles above the speed limit. I wish you wouldn’t draw attention to yourself. I wish you wouldn’t walk around calling yourself Robert Plant because it’s not like you’re the only one who still remembers Zeppelin.”

“Man, that’s not much,” Dean said. Sam just shrugged. “Fair enough. But you gotta trust me to think for myself sometimes.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I really am, Dean.” 

Dean nodded, then snorted, losing his grim look altogether. “Yeah, me too. But I got something else you can hate me for, if you want.”  
Sam closed his eyes. When he opened them, Dean was still watching him, eyes bright in spite of their irritated lids. “What?” he asked, mainly because Dean seemed to want to tell him what it was so badly.

Dean shook his head, failing, mostly, to look apologetic. “Your ice chips melted."


End file.
